G&P Review: Ulcerate

Ulcerate
The Destroyers of All
Willowtip
Of all the tricks in a film director’s repertoire, the one I probably find most engrossing is the long tracking shot. The long take is so dramatically compelling and the long, unbroken takes force actors to really perform off each other in a way that’s more organic than Hollywood’s insistence on two second scenes. When you mention great long takes, most people will point to Scorcese’s famous Copa Cabana scene in Goodfellas. That’s certainly a great scene, but don’t forget the amazing long takes in Children of Men (yes, digital trickery was involved), the phenomenal trench scenes in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory or drunken pub patrons enacting their own solar system in Bela Tarr’s apocalyptic Werckmeister Harmonies. But the king of all tracking shots is Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark: a whole 90 minute movie that’s one unbroken tracking shot that wends through St. Petersberg’s Winter Palace, featuring a cast of nearly 1,000 -- including two full live orchestras.
I get that same sense of dramatic profundity and technical mastery from Ulcerate’s latest album The Destroyers of All. It’s not enough that the songs have emotional content, but those emotions should move and expand over the course of a song. Hell, you could consider the entirety of the album to be single sinuous thread that streams you along for the better part of an hour. The swaying, viperous grace of “Omens” snaps against a blastbeaten back line while the ominous magma flow riffs of “Burning Skies” wash over the hurried double bass pounding of the drums, incinerating everything in its path and then just abruptly stopping, leaving the song hanging without resolution. But “Dead Oceans” immediately seizes that lingering anxiety, twisting the need for an emotional payoff into a warped, flayed bit of guitar strangulation.
The Destroyers of All’s slow motion apocalypse of fire is irresistibly compelling, building off what made Everything is Fire such an enjoyable listen and immolates it as a burnt sacrifice to your pleasure.

[Full disclosure: Willowtip sent me a review copy.]

G&P Review: Wadge

Wadge
Grindcore Lu’au
Grindcore Karaoke
Wadge’s tiki-tickling Grindcore Lu’au is covered in as many layers of deliberately lofi noise and scuzz and Dick Dale’s surfboard was covered in layers of Sex Wax. For all its colorful art and goofball conceits, Grindcore Lu’au is not an overproduced bit of throwaway fluff. Grindcore’s Don Ho starts with a hilarious rip on Napalm Death’s “Multinational Corporations” that extols the virtues of Hawaiian vacations and starts surfing 40 minutes of double picked surf rock grind. The Hawaiian elements and aquatic surf style guitar are organically blended into the grind in a way that makes perfect sense on “Extremity Jet-Planed/Eyes of Crust/Obstinate Erection” and “Drink for a Minute (Suffer the Distilled Men).” Proving the lofi scratch of the sound is purely deliberate, “Frenzied Suffocation” builds to an ear-bleeding static tsunami before the waves crest and break over the sudden clarity of surf-death hybrid “Demon Dogs of Waikiki.”
At nearly 40 minutes, the only criticism of the album is this is a hefty listen. In fact, Wadge could have easily pulled a Solomon and halved Grindcore Lu’au and passed it off as two full lengths of Slayer-approved proportions. I don’t see myself pulling this one out on a regular basis, but there’s no point in bitching about too much of a good thing. Pass the poi.

Grindcore Alphabet: G

Seven weeks in and more than a quarter of the way into the alphabet, G will be for grades. I want to hear from you how this little project is working or not. Have you discovered any new gems? Or are many of these bands lesser known for a good reason? What have been the major oversights? Who has surprised you? Drop a comment and discuss amongst yourselves.
Otherwise, here’s your letter G mixtape [Mediafire].

Gate – “My Anger to Whom” (Japan)
Gauze – “Thrash Thrash Thrash” (Japan)
Groinchurn – “Fickle World” (South Africa)
Gadget – “Requiem” (Sweden)
Gibbed – “Uncleanly Devoured Visions” (Japan)
Get Destroyed – “What a Mess” (United States)
Graf Orlock – “A Waste of Ammo” (United States)
Greber – “Hometown Heroin” (Canada)
Genocide (aka Repulsion) – “Violent Death” (United States)
Guyana Punch Line – “Political P.I.G.” (United States)
General Surgery – “Capricious Provisional Cadaver Grater” (Sweden)
Gride – “Nadije v Mijeni” (Czech Republic)
Ghostlimb – “Bridge Above the Above” (United States)
Gigantic Brain – “Melting Brain” (United States)
Gasp – “Harvest” (United States)
GridLink – “Naked Pieces Scattered” (United States/Japan)
Gods of Grind – “Binary Digit” (Japan)
Gore Beyond Necropsy – “Stench of Carnage; Gore Gore Goreality Stinking Holocaust” (Japan)
Godstomper – “Self Mosher” (United States)
Garbage Disposal – “Mind Grind-Machine” (Czech Republic)

Total to date: 161 bands

G&P Review: Humanity Falls

The convict knows he is a convict, an outcast, and he knows his place vis-à-vis his superior officer; but no brands, no fetters will ever be able to make him forget that he is a human being. And since he really is a human being, it is necessary to treat him as one. Merciful heavens! Human treatment may even render human a man in whom the image of God has long ago grown tarnished. It is these ‘unfortunates’ that must be treated in the most human fashion. This is their salvation and their joy.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
The House of the Dead
1860

Humanity Falls
Ordaining the Apocalypse
The Path Less Traveled
It’s not often I’ll point you to a cover song as being indicative of a band’s progression, but the way New York grinding deathsters Humanity Falls tear through Discordance Axis’ “Pattern Blue” almost serves as a Rosetta Stone for the young band’s progress on their 2010 album Ordaining the Apocalypse.
On their demo, Humanity Falls were going through the gawky, adolescent stage of their musical development. All their ideas (and they must swing by the local Costco and buy them in bulk) just didn’t quite cohere into actual songs. Those same demo tracks have returned with a vengeance on Ordaining the Apocalypse. They’ve cut the fat, bulked up the muscle and are in prime game shape, lead by a guttural death roar that erupts from the toes. Everything is leaner and tighter. There’s barely an extraneous moment on the whole 10 song package.
There are scintillating bursts of brilliance as with “Denounced Manifestation,” which hares away from a blasting opener to explore shimmering galaxies of spiraling supernovae (though it occasionally wanders too far afield for the song’s own good). Though many of the songs bring the ugly brutality of Circle of Dead Children, on the whole, Ordaining the Apocalypse has a definite entropic direction. The songs move from tightly snarled death/grind bursts to increasingly unmoored arrays of sparkling starbusts that shine and hover just above and outside the song itself. It’s a trick that works best on songs like the title track, which eventually circles back to something resembling traditional song structure coherence.
While Ordaining the Apocalypse displays a decent amount of growth for a young band that’s starting to find its own voice, the production, unfortunately, it still rather demo-ish. A more robust, layered sound would have showcased the various elements of their meticulous music to better effect. But an effort like this should prove Humanity Falls are worthy of a bigger budget when they record their follow up. While I have no doubt the Path Less Traveled put out a quality package for Ordaining the Apocalypse (seriously, go read label honcho Sean’s series over at Invisible Oranges), the band said they’re also just fine with you going ahead and downloading it. Maybe that will inspire you to send a couple bucks their way.
[Full disclosure: the band sent me a download for review.]

Demo-lition Derby: Detroit

Detroit
Demo
Detroit the city may soon boast a RoboCop statue after the nerdly internet hordes chipped in a few quid to install a bust of Peter Weller downtown for reasons that remain rather vague. I’m sure that will take the out of work autoworkers’ minds off the nearly 11 percent unemployment rate.
Alberta’s Detroit the band will soon be splitting wax with blog darlings Robocop and it’s a pretty good matchup. It’s an inspired pairing because, like Maine’s finest, Detroit like to mix the blasty fasty with the screamy ragey with occasional bouts of last call stumble home beer blackout power violence in a nine minute stew of sonic abrasions. The Infest/Crossed Out crush of “Consume” lurches into a glowering, towering loom opening of “War.” The briefest flash of old-skool crossover thrash that ignites “Impalement” is also a nice touch.
Detroit don’t boast the same spine shanking sonic clarity that made Robocop’s efforts so compelling, but for a demo, the sound is pretty robust and balanced. The guitars are feedback swamped swaths of screeching noise and low end grumble. The vocals are the slavering rantings of either a tin foil hat maniac or the prescience of an unappreciated prophet. Just as soon as you decipher what he’s rambling about you may know the difference. You can check it out (as a single track without song titles) here.

Grindcore Alphabet: F

FFFFFFFFfffffffffu--
Would you rather fuck the facts or fuck on a beach? Can you fuck the facts on the beach or is that some kinda public nudity violation? Snuggle up with the man, woman or small, unresisting mammal of your choice because G&P is about to bring the looooooooooooove.
This is your letter F compilation [Mediafire]:

Fate of Icarus – “Annihilate the Assimilationist” (United States)
Flourishing – “Fixture” (United States)
Fuck on the Beach – “Spook” (Japan)
Flagitious Idiosyncrasy in the Dilapidation – “Studeny Klih” (Japan)
Fear of God – “I’ve Seen” (United States)Switzerland
Fitcage – “Smiling Corpse” (Russia)
Forgardur Helvetis – “Krossfest Born” (Iceland)
F.A.M. – “Blood of Sahara” (Poland)
Filthy Christians – “Extremely Bad TeethBreath” (Sweden)
From the Ashes – “Wall of Prejudice” (Sweden)
F.U.B.A.R. – “The National Fear Campaign 2004” (Holland)
Feastem – “No Questions” (Finland)
Fuck the Facts – “Golden Age” (Canada)
Face on Fire – “William H. Macy’s Mustache” (Australia)
Fortitude – “Breaking the Silence of the Night” (Japan)
Flesh Parade – “Coping With It” (United States)

Total to date: 141 bands

Visual Regression

I’ve (mostly) accepted the death of music as a physical medium. So I’ve made an uncomfortable peace with the idea that in the future my music collection will largely consist of a bunch of 1s and 0s on my hard drive (provided one can bear up under my unkind ministrations) and, if I’m really lucky, a jpeg to go with it.
Albums used to be much more than just a collection of music. One of my favorite early punk and metal moves was to have the picture of your record collection spread out on the floor like this:

The common house cat is the most metal of all domestic animals.

It was a great way to show off bands' influences, and for those of us playing along at home, those became instant albums to hunt down. It was an important way of finding new music.
In my life I’ve gone from vinyl to cassette to compact disc to the mp3. That’s just a change in delivery method; I can cope with that. I miss all the other stuff that comes with albums: lyric sheets, liner notes, thank you lists and assorted album art. If you were (just throwing out a hypothetical here) a military brat bouncing around the world who had trouble making friends and never clicked with any “scene” (totally not talking about anybody in particular…moving on) those things were vital ways of finding interesting new bands in an era before you could immediately pirate any album from the comfort of your search engine. This is probably nothing more than cranky old guy reminiscence though. The world changes; you change with it or get run over. But for all the ease digital delivery provides, you’ve gotta admit physical albums were a better way of showing off your collection than this: